I am trying to migrate my application from manual build to autoconf, which is working very nicely so far. But I have one static library that I can't figure out how to integrate. That library will NOT be located in the usual library locations - the location of the binary (.a file) and header (.h file) will be given as a configure argument. (Notably, even if I move the .a file to /usr/lib or anywhere else I can think of, it still won't work.) It is also not named traditionally (it does not start with "lib" or "l").

Manual compilation is working with these (directory is not predictable - this is just an example):

gcc ... -I/home/john/mystuff /home/john/mystuff/helper.a

(Uh, I actually don't understand why the .a file is referenced directly, not with -L or anything. Yes, I have a half-baked understanding of building C programs.)

So, in my configure.ac, I can use the relevant configure argument to successfully find the header (.h file) using AC_CHECK_HEADER. Inside the AC_CHECK_HEADER I then add the location to CPFLAGS and the #include of the header file in the actual C code picks it up nicely.

Given a configure argument that has been put into $location and the name of the needed files are helper.h and helper.a (which are both in the same directory), here is what works so far:

AC_CHECK_HEADER([$location/helper.h], [AC_DEFINE([HAVE_HELPER_H], [1], [found helper.h]) CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -I$location"])

Where I run into difficulties is getting the binary (.a file) linked in. No matter what I try, I always get an error about undefined references to the function calls for that library. I'm pretty sure it's a linkage issue, because I can fuss with the C code and make an intentional error in the function calls to that library which produces earlier errors that indicate that the function prototypes have been loaded and used to compile.

I tried adding the location that contains the .a file to LDFLAGS and then doing a AC_CHECK_LIB but it is not found.

Maybe my syntax is wrong, or maybe I'm missing something more fundamental, which would not be surprising since I'm a newbie and don't really know what I'm doing.

Here is what I have tried:

AC_CHECK_HEADER([$location/helper.h], [AC_DEFINE([HAVE_HELPER_H], [1], [found helper.h]) CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -I$location"; LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -L$location"; AC_CHECK_LIB(helper)])

No dice. AC_CHECK_LIB is looking for -lhelper I guess (or libhelper?) so I'm not sure if that's a problem, so I tried this, too (omit AC_CHECK_LIB and include the .a directly in LDFLAGS), without luck:

AC_CHECK_HEADER([$location/helper.h], [AC_DEFINE([HAVE_HELPER_H], [1], [found helper.h]) CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -I$location"; LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -L$location/helper.a"])

To emulate the manual compilation, I tried removing the -L but that doesn't help:

AC_CHECK_HEADER([$location/helper.h], [AC_DEFINE([HAVE_HELPER_H], [1], [found helper.h]) CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -I$location"; LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS $location/helper.a"])

I tried other combinations and permutations, but I think I might be missing something more fundamental....